In Paris, the Museum of Jewish Art and History is exhibiting Pascal Monteil, embroiderer of suspended bodies

Embroidery is a discipline of patience, an art of ornamentation and representation that affirms choices as much as motifs charged with fixing memory, assigning it a refuge, material and fragile. Cotton, silk or wool, gold or silver, the thread establishes the story, articulates memories and inventions, without the support really mattering. But embroidery is also, orally, adding details, perhaps imaginary circumstances to a story to enrich it, embellish it, give it a new dimension where the truth counts less than the seduction at work.

Pascal Monteil knows this, and he scrupulously respects the double contract he makes his own when, having left for India as a nomad, he has the revelation that embroiderers with wide-open eyes, straight, serene and attentive, tell the world most accurately. So the artist who, until then, worked as an architect in the skillful montage of photographs and paintings, decides to claim this invisible brotherhood and adopts the needle and woolen thread. He only concedes to his Gard origins the hemp canvas, which he chooses as a support for the narratives he imagines upstream of his artisanal practice.

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